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Similes
Book 1, Chapter 2
Explanation and Analysis—Scared Green:
In a moment of painful situational irony, Vivaldo describes his violent past with queerness to Cass. He also employs an idiom as he explains how he and his friends raped a stranger:
'One time,' he said, 'we got into a car and drove over to the Village and we picked up this queer, a young guy, and we drove him back to Brooklyn. Poor guy, he was scared green before we got halfway there but he couldn’t jump out of the car. We drove into this garage, there were seven of us, and we made him go down on all of us and then we beat [...] him and took all his money and took his clothes and left him lying on that cement floor, and, you know, it was winter.'
The scene that Vivaldo is somewhat casually describing here is horrifying. The idioms he chooses add to the story’s casual delivery. He describes the young man he and his friends kidnap as being “green with fear" when he realizes what is about to happen to him. The idiom implies that their victim was so frightened he looked pale and nauseous. After they gang-rape him they also beat him violently and extensively and leave him naked on the floor of a garage in the Brooklyn winter night.
The situational irony here, of course, lies in the fact that Vivaldo is explaining an act he and his posse did in order to prove their own masculinity. Kidnapping a man they decided was “queer” and forcing him to perform oral sex on each of them while the others watched was, in Vivaldo’s mind, intended to prove how much he hated “queers.” Soliciting and receiving oral sex from a person of the same gender would not, in the general case, be considered a typically heterosexual act. However, Vivaldo tells this story bluntly to Cass as though challenging her to realize how masculine and heterosexual he is.
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